The surprising data about how often to send promotional emails

As a marketer, sending promotional emails is probably a common revenue generating tactic in your marketing toolkit.

How often you send emails can have a significant effect on your company revenue and email engagement rates. But it’s not as simple as just sending more emails to generate more revenue.

In this post, we reveal some surprising data about how often you should send promotional emails and what to consider when deciding how frequently to send yours.

How do subscribers respond to changes in email frequency?

There are four common ways an email subscriber can react to changes in email frequency:

1) They unsubscribe/mark your emails spam.

This is the dreaded result that no marketer wants to happen. But guess what the #1 reason people unsubscribe from emails is? It’s because the sender mails too often. A survey done by TechnologyAdvice earlier this year asked 472 U.S. adults, “For what reasons have you marked a business’ emails as spam?”

Here’s how they answered:

Email frequency came up again in that same study when respondents were asked how marketers could improve in their emails. The #1 answer to that question was “less frequent emails.”

More than twice as many people chose “less frequent emails” than any of the other options given. Email frequency is something subscribers care about. A lot.

Lesson: Nailing your frequency, providing value in the content you send and personalizing your messages are all important, but it all comes back to respect. The days of spray and pray marketing are over and today’s consumers expect highly-targeted messages that give them what they want, when they want it. Before you send an email, ask yourself, “what value does my subscriber gain from receiving this message?” and “How can I provide the most value to the subscriber by making this relevant to them?”

2) They disengage.

If you start sending too many emails that are low-value, the most common effect is that you’ll see open and click-through rates drop. But other metrics can be impacted, too.

As you can see from the charts, for many, as the email frequency increased, so did the complaints. And the read rate decreased as frequency increased. The readers’ simply didn’t keep up with the volume.

Lesson: Test your send frequency on smaller portions of your list to measure impact. Remember, getting more opens and clicks without a change in visits or revenue may not equate to anything tangible so always test before you dive it head first.

3) There’s no noticeable change.

Doubling your email sends and seeing no appreciable change would seem like a bit of a letdown, right? But it happens.

Often one portion of your subscribers will respond well to an increase in frequency. They’ll boost your sales and engagement a bit. But the other portion of your list may choose to tune out the additional emails, erasing the gains you made from the other group. The result would basically be a wash.

Lesson: An effective way to combat this is to use segmentation. Segmentation enables you to target content to exactly the right audience. You can also create segments based on custom data your contacts share with you.

4) You get more sales and engagement.

This is the outcome everybody hopes for. It’s what happened for the UK insurance company Aviva. And they didn’t just double their email sends – they increased them by nearly twelvefold.

Aviva had been mailing only once a year, usually in the month before a customer’s annual policy expired. But after hiring the UK email agency Alchemy Worx, they developed a plan to send more emails out. Aviva did this very carefully, after:

Surveying subscribers to see what kinds of content they would most like to receive

Increasing the mail frequency slowly

The result?

48% more requested insurance quotes

304% more unique clicks

45% more email revenue

In another example of how increasing send rate can boost engagement, digital marketing company SimpleRelevance increased the send frequency of a travel site from twice a month to weekly emails. They also added dynamic templates for customized content.

The result?

278% increase in average monthly pageviews

60% fewer bounces in email sends

There’s an important common denominator between those two successful campaigns, and it isn’t just increasing the send frequency. Both campaigns underwent significant optimization in tandem with the increased mailing frequency. Aviva’s subscribers were surveyed to learn what content they wanted. Avivia also redesigned their newsletter. For SimpleRelevance’s client, their subscribers went from a one-size-fits-all template to dynamic content based on how subscribers responded to several channels, not just email.

Lesson: If you’re tempted to increase send frequency (especially in time for holiday shopping), it might be smart to reconsider the emails you send at the same time. Subscribers might not mind hearing from you more often, so long as your messages are valuable.

How often are other email marketers sending their emails?

As you can see, the number of emails sent per month varies quite a bit. But the largest group of marketers – 39% – mails 2-3 times a month.

While good studies are always valid, they haven’t been done on the list that matters most: Yours.

How often should you send your emails?

Fortunately, there’s some data on how often people like to get emails. But remember, they didn’t ask your subscribers. The chart below from MarketingSherpa gives you an idea of optimal send frequency.

This survey was conducted in January 2015. It’s based on how 2,057 adults answered the question, “How often, if ever, would you like to receive promotional emails (e.g., coupons, sales notifications) from companies that you do business with?”

Clearly, the two most popular choices were “At least monthly” and “At least weekly.” The third most popular choice was “weekly”, and the fourth option picked most was “monthly”.

Weekly emails are so effective that many marketers send them. Monthly emails can be effective, too. But there’s always a concern that mailing monthly may be so infrequent that subscribers might forget who you are, and thus be more likely to delete your messages.

When a subscriber clicks through they land on a preference page that looks like this:

The preference center gives subscribers a simple way to select how frequently they want to receive emails and puts them in control of communications.

Wrap up

Changing how often you email your subscribers can have varied effects, both positive and negative. Your subscribers may:

Unsubscribe

Engage less often

Engage more often

Engage with additional emails at the same rate as they had before

It’s unlikely all of your subscribers will decide to do just one of those things. You’re going to get blended results. The best solution is to carefully test what works best for your list. If you decide to increase your send frequency, optimize your emails with helpful content so your subscribers get more value from receiving more emails from you.

Your turn:How often are you mailing to your subscribers? Have you considered changing it? Do you give your subscribers the option of changing their email frequency? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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I do feel that studies that ask someone what causes them to mark an email as spam, with a choice of ‘too many emails’ is almost certain to get that as the most popular answer. Who doesn’t get too many emails? Full stop.

But the issue is the question context, this is already about emails that the customer considers spam. It needs a survey question ‘for brands that send you 4 emails per week, why don’t you mark them as spam’. Because there are many brands sending such a frequency, especially in fashion, that are not seeing their emails marked as spam. Frequency is not the issue per se.

Or how about this for a survey question ‘for emails you mark as spam, if you received the same content but less often would it make them more relevant, higher quality and value’?

Kim

Thanks for reading and commenting Tim! You are correct about the intention of the survey that is cited in the article and that there is no one size fits all answer to this question. Cheers and thanks for reading!Kim

Matt

I get maybe a 15-20 different promos/newsletters. Anything over 2-3 times a week is too much. Even the ones that are just news (guardian/mic) every day is just too much. And they even put the same stories in the 2-3 days in a row. When I get something 2-5 times a month, I’ll usually put more time into the email and check things out, but when it comes every day, its just a quick scroll and delete. And open rates – meaningless – I use Thunderbird. When I delete the message before it, I automatically go to the next message, and its opened. Even if I don’t read it, at the time, its considered opened. I have a feeling that they see that I open all the emails, and think I want more, and keep increasing the frequency until I unsubscribe. I used to get Target emails 1-2 times a week, and now its every day. I went to the website and there is two options. Gets tons of emails or none at all. Please give me an option for getting less.

Eayana. com

It’s kinda surprising blog post, though sending email is one of the main tool of marketing products/items online but, others hate this kind of approach.http://eayana.com/blog/ Maybe it depends how you present your marketing approach